Part 4/16:
Ever since Jacob Bernoulli proved the law of large numbers in 1713, it was understood that for independent events—like flipping a fair coin—the average outcome converges to an expected value over many trials. This provided a solid foundation for predicting random experiments: flip a coin repeatedly, and as the number of flips grows, the proportion of heads will approach 50%.
Nekrasov believed that this principle implied independence in social statistics—marriage rates, crime, birthrates—suggesting that individual decisions were acts of free will. His reasoning was that, since these societal outcomes conformed to the law, the underlying decisions must be independent and thus free.